Quotes By Author: George Bernard Shaw

“The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.”

“You may remember that on earth—though of course we never confessed it—the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.”

“You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.”

“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.”

“Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.”

“Yes, a lifetime of happiness. If it were only the first half hour’s happiness, Tavy, I would buy it for you with my last penny. But a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.”

“The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active. That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be tired.”

“We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.”

“The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all.”

“Don’t think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone. God is alone. And the loneliness of God is His strength.”

“Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it….”

“He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches. ”

“When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.”

“My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.”

“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”